Commentary

Along with “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “The Solitary Reaper” is

one of Wordsworth’s most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. In
“Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth said that he was able to look on nature
and hear “human music”; in this poem, he writes specifically about
real human music encountered in a beloved, rustic setting. The song
of the young girl reaping in the fields is incomprehensible to him (a
“Highland lass,” she is likely singing in Scots), and what he
appreciates is its tone, its expressive beauty, and the mood it creates
within him, rather than its explicit content, at which he can only
guess. To an extent, then, this poem ponders the limitations of
language, as it does in the third stanza (“Will no one tell me what
she sings?”). But what it really does is praise the beauty of music
and its fluid expressive beauty, the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling” that Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry.

By placing this praise and this beauty in a rustic, natural setting, and
by and by establishing as its source a simple rustic girl, Wordsworth
acts on the values of Lyrical Ballads. The poem’s structure is simple
—the first stanza sets the scene, the second offers two bird
comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the content of
the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the
speaker—and its language is natural and unforced. Additionally, the
final two lines of the poem (“Its music in my heart I bore / Long
after it was heard no more”) return its focus to the familiar theme of
memory, and the soothing effect of beautiful memories on human
thoughts and feelings.

“The Solitary Reaper” anticipates Keats’s two great meditations on

art, the “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which the speaker steeps himself
in the music of a bird in the forest—Wordsworth even compares the
reaper to a nightingale—and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the
speaker is unable to ascertain the stories behind the shapes on an urn.
It also anticipates Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” with the figure of an
emblematic girl reaping in the fields.